ESPN Ombudsman On Grantland: "Mostly boring" And Sometimes "Even Dangerous

Considering how many commenters here, here and elsewhere supported Grantland's right to push a story to the brink of suicide--a golf putter story no less--it was comforting to read ESPN Ombudsman Robert Lipsyte's excoriating breakdown on the saga that is "Dr V's Magical Putter."

This won't bring Dr. V back or comfort her partner, but it's hard to imagine how Grantland's team recovers from Lipsyte's analysis.

Just a few moments into reading that very story recently on Grantland, it was shaping up as another one of those bloated selfies that clog the arteries of sports-lit these days.

Four graphs and I was gone.

Lypsite gets into the aggressiveness of Grantland writer Caleb Hannan and as I did, comes away appalled.

Hannan never meets Vanderbilt in person, but in his due diligence he discovers that she has probably lied about her scientific and government credentials — at least he is unable to verify her degrees and work record. He finds out toward the end of his reporting that Vanderbilt is transgender, with two ex-wives and three children. Almost accidentally, he later learns that she has committed suicide. His reaction seems careless, even callous.

More on Hannan:

Because he knows little about the besieged transgender community, he conflates all her personal lies and apparently comes to believe — if he really thought about it — that as a presumed con artist she was fair game and had no right to privacy.

Sadly, many others continue to feel this way. And again, it's a putter, not a national security story.

The story itself is structurally clumsy and flabbily edited. Yet Grantland’s gatekeepers – including Bill Simmons, the site’s founder and editor-in-chief, and more than a dozen editors in all — waved the story on through seven months of meetings and drafts and tweaks. They may have been blinded by the idea that had captivated them in the first place, the self-absorbed young man looking for his quick fix, a metaphor for the times and perhaps Grantland’s demographic. But that was not the story any more. The twists and turns were the story, the possible lack of resolution and some serious reflections on responsibility and death.

He stops short of blaming them for the suicide, but it reads as if Lipsyte has no doubts about what drove Dr. V to take her life.

The education process continued in Grantland with an accompanying column by Kahrl, an accomplished ESPN.com baseball editor, who is trangender. Kahrl writes that Hannan’s story “figures to be a permanent exhibit of what not to do, and how not to treat a fellow human being.”

As for Grantland going forward...

Grantland is a promising site, only 32 months old, with a young staff being shaped by Simmons, a talented, over-extended 44-year-old with less traditional, hard-core journalism experience but considerable vision and celebrity. Grantland is a leader in so-called long-form journalism on the web (as opposed to short-form Twitter), which is being attacked lately for being ubiquitous and trendy.

It is a treasure when it’s in the right hands (see ESPN’s Wright Thompson and Grantland’s own Bryan Curtis, among others), mostly boring when not -- and sometimes, as we’ve seen, even dangerous. As are all forms.

“I feel really bad about the impact the piece had on transgender readers,” Simmons told me. “I read all those anguished emails about how badly the piece made them feel, the dark places it took them to.”

Interesting that he continues to focus on only the transgender readers as having been offended by the tactics. Sad, actually.